It is well known that people get things caught in their throat and are in danger of choking. Although generally an object that is lodged in the trachea is more dangerous and could cause choking whereas an object that is lodged in the esophagus is less dangerous, onlookers do not know whether the object is lodged in the windpipe or the esophagus and either predicament requires immediate help. Restaurants, wedding halls, schools, hotels and countless other places would obviously love to have a solution to that.
The prior art includes aspirators used by medical service technicians that suck the object out. The disadvantage is it requires expertise since it involves inserting the aspirator down the throat to the point of the object. The other significant prior art is the Heimlich maneuver. The disadvantages of it are that not everyone knows of it and it requires some expertise, it requires a second person and it cannot be done on certain types of people such as very overweight people. A third type of prior art that has developed is patents describing various types of devices designed to suck objects out of the throat of a choking victim through a single tube. These devices have not been successful in the sense that there is no known device of this kind used regularly in a school, home, restaurant, hotel, catering hall, etc. Furthermore, the devices described in these patents are not easy to use in the context of an excited choking victim.
One problem with known devices is the time needed to establish a seal in the choking victim's pharynx when the victim is in an excited state. Attempts to address this problem in the prior art, such as by employing a seal at the mouth with a mask rather than relying on a seal at the throat, have not solved or even addressed the additional problem that the tube in the mouth might suck up materials from the esophagus rather than the object lodged in the trachea if the seal around the trachea is not effective. Furthermore, certain of these patents use a complicated system of creating a partial vacuum such as by a piston, spring and latch. None of these devices have become popular, as noted.
Accordingly, what is needed is a device that overcomes the disadvantages of the prior art and actually becomes popular in the sense of being located in countless schools, restaurants, catering halls, hotels and homes.